Set up a Collectd client

Table of Contents

This tutorial shows you how to set up a collectd client for use with a collectd server. What is collectd? collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too ;).

You need a collectd server set up to fully use this tutorial, but I also have written a tutorial to do that.

The configuration file is relatively simple. Make sure to replace $VARIABLE$ by the correct on for your server. You load plugins via "LoadPlugin $name". The network part is important, this configures our client to send its data to our server. Replace $COLLECT SERVER IP with your collectd server IP.

Make sure the file has a blank newline at the end. If it has not, collectd will fail to start/run correctly.

Configure collectd plugins

Now create the following file: /etc/collectd/plugins.conf, it doesn't exist by default. This will house the plugin config. Add the following content to it, but make sure it matches your LoadPlugin settings above. If you don't have the ping plugin, you also don't need the config for it.